A little note - Dagblog has a code, Terms Of Service, that we all are obligated to follow as long as we are here. I realize I've passed those bounds myself and so have others. This is a very heated issue and it is wise for all of us to try to watch ourselves.

If you guys have the time, read this entire essay. It was sent to me by a friend from Florida and is written by a gentleman who obviously did not enjoy his experience working at a predominantly black school. If you can make it through, reading stuff like this is very important as it taps in to the mindset of many in our society:

There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl -- black or white -- became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.

One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.

One day, I asked him, "Why do you come to school?"

He wouldn't answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: "He get dat green and get dem females."

"What is the green?" I asked. "Money or dope?" "Both," said Yidarius with a smile.

A very fat black interrupted from across the room: "We get dat lunch," Mr. Jackson. "We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss." He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. "Nigga, we know'd you be lovin' brickfuss!" shouts another student.

Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good.

Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist's fantasy--in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers--and yet the blacks fail while the whites passed.

It's sad and sick that not only a person would feel the need to write this and that he would be cowardly enough to write it anonymously but it does help reinforce much of what drives racism in this country.

This man obviously did not seek out  a job at a mostly black junior high or high school. It was an unfortunate series of events in his personal and professional life that led to him ending up there. He falls in with a whole bunch of stereotypes - that black people as a whole are susceptible to drugs, sex, ignorance and violence that the pale species simply never have and never will.

His own self loathing therefore gets subjected on people who have nothing to do with it - people who behave the way that people in poverty usually do.

You see, white people have never sold or used drugs, have never not known about certain things and therefore been ignorant, they've never had sex or gotten pregnant before the socially acceptable age. Black folks, on the other hand, have never done things like invent traffic lights, peanut butter, jazz, blues, rock and roll and hip-hop or been elected President of the United States. This world would just be such a better place without their obesity, kinky hair and welfare status.

It's not good people who think this way - it is people who have become losers and are unwilling to pull themselves up from hate.

I have a sister like this. Hell, I have a bunch of family like this. My sister would talk about her living in Los Angeles and later Texas like some sort of dystopian nightmare - in which she was constantly having to escape from Hispanic illegal immigrants who hopped the border just so that they could rape her. Her quest for survival, according to last time I had this misfortune to be around her, apparently started even in Seattle - as she could not stop rambling about bussing and not getting in to the school she wanted to be in because she was "too white." She has been on about that shit for damn near twenty years - every time I've had the misfortune of being around her has been like a KKK rally.

This writer wanted to look at things from a tribal perspective - not once does he look into the minds (and they do have minds, believe it or not, asshole) of the students he taught. It all has the tone of an Anthropological Study of the Savages of the African Diaspora. My sister, the last time I saw her, defended herself when I got really pissed off by her saying racist stuff by saying she thought I'd relate since  I had been bullied myself at a predominantly black school as a kid. That was true but unlike her, that experience led to me becoming immersed in the culture and trying to understand it (and getting to the point where I work in the world of hip-hop).

This writer, like her, seemed to have stepped foot in this predominantly black school with the presumption that these people were "others" - he never makes the connection that the reason they may have been so rude to him could have to do with his attitude to begin with.

This is the reality, however, despite the election of Barack Obama. The tone of this essay is indicative of alot of people in this country, especially where he is from. I have been out east on several occasions in my life - black folks in the South are about as close to India's "untouchables" as you will get in the West. Many Southerners pride themselves on their lack of miscegenation and the free association of many skin colors that you get everywhere else is still pretty absent. (So much for all that "freedom" talk, right?)

It's not really worth arguing with but it is important to be aware of. There is truth when this essayist says that most white people try to dance around racial issues - if they didn't, conservatism wouldn't sell to a country that is built on diversity. 

Alot of conservative thought sounds a whole lot different once you take serious racial prejudice in to account - when applied to the real world, what these folks want to see implemented at best would be a cessation of funding towards non-white schools, at worst genocide. You hear, in much more hushed tones, this same sort of talk on the radio programs of conservatives like Dennis Prager - the presence of black guests and talk of "soft bigotry" a mask for flat bigotry.

These people aren't thinking and it's really important to remember that.